John D. Yohannan was born in Persia in 1910. In 1918 his family emigrated to Flint, Michigan, after his father's death in Hamadan. Yohannan grew up in Flint, Yonkers, New York, and New York City. After graduating from City College of New York, he earned a master's at Columbia and a PhD at New York University studying Persian poetry. Yohannan taught at City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center for almost 40 years. Some of his academic honors include a Blumenthal fellowship from New York University in 1941; a Ford Foundation grant in 1954; and Fulbright lectureships at the Universities of Salonica and Athens in Greece from 1958 to 1960 and at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, in 1963. His books include A Treasury of Asian Literature, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife in World Literature, Persian Poetry in England and America: A Two Hundred Year History, and New Writing from the Middle East. A Treasury of Asian Literature is still in use today as a college textbook for survey courses.
